bChapter /bb222 /b

    April POV

    I should be afraid of a man who speak to an alpha like that, especially Xander. I should be angry at the n he’s given us, the one that makes my stomach turn. I’m all those things, but I still step closer to him.

    +33)

    “What dol do,” I ask. “If the baby is who you say she is, do I have to do anything. Do I have to pray to her. Do I have to ask her to save him.” Maybe that’s the way?

    “Do not ask her to save him,” the warlock says at once, and for the first time, I hear urgency in his voice that sounds almost like fear. “If you ask the Morrayne to choose, she will choose the bnce. She will choose the world. She always has, which means she won’t choose to save him. She will burn him with the Hollowed Queen. Your mate has to fight for himself. What you can do is hold your ground. Do not step into the circle of the Hollow. Let Eryx sense you, let him hear you breathe, and see you. Let him decide if he wants to live, and if he does, he will remember why.

    Inod, though my throat feels like it has been packed with ss. Xander looks at me and then nods too, once, short and hard. “You will not cross the threshold,” he says, and it is not a question.

    promise not to,” I answer, because I mean it. I don’t know what waits in there for a woman who carries a goddess. I don’t want to test whether the Hollow bows or bites.

    My hand strokes my stomach. The Morrayne is the ultimate being. She’s the creator of the goddess, the creator of everything. It’s hard, I still feel like she’s my daughter, my child. Maybe she is, maybe she won’t live like the queen she once was?

    The warlock turns again and the three of us continue to walk. The guards fall in behind, more than before. The path that leads to the Hollow is older than the pack house, older than the low wall that pretends a line on the ground can keep anything out. The trees thicken and change as we near them. Their trunks go from brown to something like old iron. Their leaves dull at the edges like they have been breathed on too many times by mouths that were not made for breathing.

    Even the light is wrong here. It presses instead of lying down. It gathers in hollows and hangs there like water. My skin prickles. My wolf lifts her head inside me and then lowers it again, wary and silent. The baby kicks once, sharp and sure, and the warlock nces back, as if to say yes, she knows where she is.

    That’s crazy, how he knew the baby kicked, how he knows everything.

    We stop at the old line where Xander’s people hammered ward–stakes into the earth. There are runes burned into each one, ckened and dense. Some have gone cold. Some pulse faintly.

    The warlock looks at them, amused. “You learned to spell the way a child learns to swim,” he says. “By falling in and refusing to drown.”

    “Then fix them,” Xander says.

    Ery exined the wards bwere /bmeant to stop her getting out, and in a way it did. She got into me because I went into the Hollow.

    will make new ones, the warlock replies. “It is faster to rebuild a bridge bthan /bto patch a rotten nk.”

    He kneels and unrolls a narrow strip of dark cloth, Inside are things that look like tools but are likely not. A knife that is not metal. A vial of something that moves in a cincle een when the bottle is still. A ring of bone with a crack in it that hums when the light touches it. He works without flourish. He works like ia /iman bwho /bhas done this so many times the motions bare /banothernguage.

    He makes it look like something easy, like something beveryone /bcan just do with a flick of their wrist. I know though, that’s not the truth.

    He sets seven bstones /bbin /ba bcurve /band drips the circling liquid on each. He says words that make the hairs on iny arms lift bagain /band this time my wolf presses closer, not to protect, only to listen. The ground answers. That is what it feels like. The ground, the old ground, the ground beneath what we bthank /bis ground, rouses and pays battention /b

    “Now to the spot.” He steps forward and I stop here, seeing them getting closer to the mark. The warlock looks around and I see her, the Hollowed Queen. She’s almost human. She’s got a body but it doesn’t move right, it doesn’t look right.

    38%

    +33

    For a moment, I wait, but then I realise he’s done something. She can’t see us, she has no idea the warlock is just there, outside her circle.

    “Bring him,” the warlock says.

    “I already sent a runner while we were walking,” Xander says and then he whistles.

    I hear feeting closer, a young guard running up. “They are ready,” he says to Xander, a nce at me and the Hollow and back again. “They will move him on your word.”

    “Do it,” Xander says. He looks at me then, and some of what he feels is allowed to show. He wants to put me in a room and lock the door and sit outside it with a sword. He wants to go down and carry his son up himself and bite the air if it tries ito /itouch him. He wants to let the warlock do this and kill him if he fails. He wants us all to live. “Stay on that side,” he tells me.

    Inod. The warlock speaks without looking up. “Let her stand where I tell her. Not one step more.”

    Of course, he’s in charge, it’s not like Xander suggested I leave ore past.

    We wait. It is a strange waiting because it’s not still, it’s not pacing. The Hollow breathes and every breath is the length of a slow wave. At the second wave I taste iron. At the third I taste ash. By the fourth there are footsteps on the path behind us, many feet at once, all keeping time. The guardse first, then more behind them, then two men hauling a length of chain that is wrapped around the wrists of the man in the center.

    Eryx.

    His head is down and his hair half hides his face. He is shirtless. His skin has the pale sheen of a man who has been inside too long, and the thin sheen of sweat that belongs to a fever. The irons around his wrists are thick, set with runes that my eyes want to slide off of. The chain at his ankles ngs when he stumbles over a root. He doesn’t make a sound when he stumbles. He doesn’t look around. He doesn’t smell the air and tip his head the way wolves

    do when they are near a thing that wants them.

    The sight of him hits me like a blow and I don’t realize I have reached for him until Xander’s hand closes around my arm. It’s not cruel. It’s not a warning either. It’s a reminder of the promise I made.

    “Here,” the warlock says, and taps the ground with his bone ring. “Set him on the seam.”

    They bring Eryx forward and slow when the warlock lifts his hand. The warlock steps closer and looks at Eryx the way a man might look down into a deep well and measure its dark. “Good,” he says softly, and he is not speaking to any of us.

    Eryx doesn’t move, and I realise he’s too exhausted to. He’s inot /ieven reacting anymore.

    The warlock draws a circle on the ground with the knife that isn’t metal. The dirt doesn’t scrape, instead, it parts. Then, he pours the rest of the liquid into the groove and it runs like quicksilver, bright even in this hungry light. He speaks again and this time the words carry weight. Theynd on the earth like stones and the earth epts each one as if it has been waiting for them toe home.

    Xander says nothing. He watches and breathes and I can feel his heart as if the air between us has be an animal that carries it up and down. I step where the warlock pointed, a little to the left, behind the first ward stake, close enough that if Eryx lifts his head he will see me. Not close enough for me to reach him if he lunges.

    “Loose the silence,” the warlock says.

    The guard captain hesitates, “Alpha” Yeah, removing what holds Eryx down is a risk. He could use his magic, shift into his wolf, attack us before the warlock has a chance to do anything

    “Do it,” Xander says, his voice is calm, and steady but I know it’s not real, he’s just as terrified as anyone else.

    They twist the buckle on the iron at Eryx’s wrists. The runes dim, not to nothing, to a ce halfway between asleep and waking. Eryx pulls one breath, then another. The thirdes ragged and he fifts his head as if he just realised he’s been moved.

    His eyes are wrong and familiar at once. They are Eryx’s eyesb, /bthe color I have kissed, the shape I have known in dark rooms and on bright mornings, but there is another shine inside them. It moves like oil in water. It spreads when he blinks.

    38%

    b+33/b)

    The Hollow stiffens. That is what it feels like to me. The trees draw in. The ground hums. The air leans forward.

    “Good,” the warlock says again. He lifts the bone ring. “Come then.”

    The air cracks, it’s not loud but it’s not quiet either. It opens like a lid. Something moves through it. I smell old smoke, not campfire, not hearth, the kind that sits in temple stone after a pyre, the kind that refuses to wash out of hair. Eryx convulses once. He doesn’t cry out. The warlock begins to walk, a small circle inside therger one he cut, and each step he takes draws the light tighter.

    My mouth is dry again. I want to scream, I want to say find another way, but I don’t. I breathe and let my wolf set her back to mine inside me. The baby kicks, once, then again, harder. It hurts, and I am grateful for the hurt because it means I am still in my body.

    Eryx’s head jerks toward me. For a heartbeat his eyes are only his. He sees me. I know that he sees me because the breath he takes next is mine too. “April,” he says, and it is a sound torn out of an old wound. I want to run to him, I want to wrap my arms around ihim/i.

    “I am here,” I say, and I don’t step forward, I know the risks if I do. “I am here, and I promise you, I am not moving.”

    The warlock’s voice rises and the seam answers him like a mouth answering a song. Eryx bends under it. He fights it the way he fights everything that tries to pull him where he didn’t choose to go. The wrong shine in his eyes burns brighter. It tries to look at me. It tries to use his mouth. He bites his lip

    until blood runs rather than let it.

    “Hold,” the warlockmands, and there’s no telling whether he speaks to me, to Xander, to Eryx, or to the Hollow. Perhaps to all.

    It happens like a tide. Slow at first, then quick enough to frighten even the sea. The air turns hot. The ring on the warlock’s hand glows. The circle he cut goes white like bone left in sun. Eryx’s body bows under something I can’t see, and then he is still, so still I think he has stopped breathing.

    The Hollowed Queen shrieks loudly and vanishes, and I know she’s inside of him.

    “Now,” the warlock says, and his voice is not patient any longer. It is a de. “Choose, wolf.”

    Eryx’s eyes snap back to mine. In them is everything we have been and everything I feared we wouldn’t be again. There is love and pride and fury and hunger and the stubbornness that made me notice him when I should have kept my head down. The wrong shine rises to swallow it, and he bares his teeth at it as if it were a thing he could bite.

    “Live,” I whisper, because I can’t say anything else and have it matter. “Live, Eryx.”

    He closes his eyes and the warlock throws his head back and speaks a word I can’t hear. The light in the circle goes from white to something I don’t have a name for. It’s not a color, it’s not warmth or even cold. It’s the idea of them. The Hollow makes a sound like trees breaking without wind. The guards füinch. Xander doesn’t move.

    The warlock lowers his head. He looks at me one time, quick and sharp and measuring, then back to my mate, and for the first time I understand that he’s not only here for a task. He’s here because he believes the world can be made whole again and he’s tired of waiting for someone else to do the work.

    “Hold him,” he says to the circle and the ground obeys.

    Then he begins to burn.

    AD